Two years after I had finished my fieldwork in the city of Murcia, Spain, I was in Germany when my phone began to vibrate intensely: it was the WhatsApp group of residents from the neighbourhood of La Paz, a marginalised district in the east of the city. Ambrosio¹, one of the neighbourhood’s activists, shared a couple of photos: three workers were up on a crane painting the façade of a building, while two others were on the ground and a sixth was taking photographs. On top of freshly painted white facades, they were marking lines in various colours to form the words Juntos Somos (‘Together We Are’) and Barrio Alma (‘Soul Neighbourhood’).

Image 1: Ambrosio’s picture in the neighbourhood’s WhatsApp group. Credit: Damián Omar Martínez

‘They only think about elections’, Alberto answered, referring to the People’s Party, head of the municipal government for 25 years. After detailing a long list of the problems and needs faced by the neighbourhood’s residents, he continued, ‘I fear the worst: another make-up operation’, concluding that ‘only painting, spending 2 million € +/- is a waste and stupidity. And it can only be justified by the Gattopardo: “Changing something so that everything stays the same”’.

In this piece I explore collective vertigo – as the appearance of movement to a subject that remains still – to show how abysmal scenarios are generated in situations of collective expectation. I put my attention specifically on how my interlocutors verbalise the exhaustion produced by collective vertigo and how they theorise it as a form of Gattopardismo. Lived as a déjà vu, the vertiginous is here experienced as a repetition of past events that anticipates nothing will change. lmost like a shuddering or reverberation.

Gattopardismo refers to a form of politics that seeks to maintain the status quo by changing only small things while making people believe in more holistic change (Borja, 2018). The concept comes from the plot of Gattopardo, a novel by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. The book unravels the Sicilian aristocracy’s attempts to retain power by creating the illusion of change at a time when the rising petite bourgeoisie was beginning to occupy positions of power during the Italian Risorgimento. Gattopardismo is best illustrated when one of the main characters cynically tells another that ‘If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change’ (di Lampedusa, 1960, p. 31).

Alberto’s reference to di Lampedusa’s book was not fortuitous. Since I had started fieldwork in January 2016, the City Government and a private developer had promised on at least three occasions that this time they would finally put a solution to the neighbourhood’s problems with an integral renewal plan. These promises were always followed by little or no actions. But this community had been waiting for longer: in the late 1990s, the regional government created high expectations about a thorough renewal plan. In the end, only a few façades were fixed. Some years later, when the housing bubble was growing, a real estate agent proposed to dismantle and re-build the entire neighbourhood from scratch, increasing the property value of their new homes. In the end, only the neighbourhood’s kindergarten was demolished. It was 2007, the bubble burst, and the project was paralysed even before it had started. And here they were in May 2019: a week before municipal elections and more than two years after the city mayor had said that ‘this time we are going to end up doing it’.

Stagnant and repetitive, the Time of Urban Renewal in La Paz has turned the mere fact of painting façades into a trigger of hopelessness and despair, becoming a trope that anticipates nothing of substance will change: ‘We’re not going to see this project’ – commented a senior attendant in a neighbourhood meeting. ‘The last thing they did was to paint. They’re going to whitewash it, and that’s it’. The reference to the futility of painting the façades brings up a sense of déjà vu where the repetition of past events anticipates future actions will be the same as they were in the past (Bandak & Coleman, 2019).

Looking at Gattopardismo as a form of collective vertigo allows us to understand how a community in chronic crisis explains the ongoing, seemingly unresolvable tension between the constant generation and quashing of expectations by political and economic elites. This collective vertigo produces hopelessness, verbalised by Antonia when she said that she was ‘tired of this, which seems to change but it doesn’t change’. Even Gregorio, probably the most optimistic of the residents, gave up after seeing the picture shared by Ambrosio in the WhatsApp group: ‘This penultimate “play” – Gregorio said – is the “acid test”, in case there is still anyone with a little bit of hope’. Gattopardismo appears in the everyday language of this community as an explanatory framework to make sense of the exhaustion and hopelessness of their abysmal scenario. A scenario of collective expectation where promises never come to fruition, and the only small changes that take place are nothing more than a ruse to keep everything the same.

Endnotes

1. All names were changed to protect this story’s protagonists’ anonymity. [↩]

References

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